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There was no evidence of vote flipping or election tampering in the May 2006 Regional Transportation Election, a state attorney general's investigation has determined.

An attorney for the Pima County Democratic Party asked the Attorney General's Office to investigate whether the votes were illegally "flipped" or reversed.

The party has also filed two lawsuits earlier this year to obtain records and databases of other elections from the Pima County Elections Division.

"We concluded that there was no criminal action in the behavior we investigated," Attorney General Terry Goddard said Friday.

However, he pointed out there are other "security flaws" that need to be addressed by Pima County and the other 11 Arizona counties that use the Diebold GEMS electronic voting system.

"It's a very important thing that was raised, and all of the counties that use the system will be notified," Goddard said.

Those flaws include hard-drive problems that make it difficult to search for deleted data, the ability to change time-stamp data on files, a way to hide file changes and a way to change the vote totals, as long as it's done systemwide.

The company that tested the system as part of the investigation said it is unlikely any of these problems occurred in this case, but points out they need to be corrected.

Another problem with the software is the ability for vote tampering to be covered up.

"It is far easier to remove evidence of tampering from the logs than to actually tamper with the vote totals," wrote William Miller of iBeta, the company that tested the voting system for the Attorney General's Office.

Goddard also said he shared his findings with the secretary of state, who oversees elections.

Pima County Democratic Party attorney William Risner said the good thing is that other counties will learn they need to pay attention to these security flaws in electronic voting systems. He also said he hopes the attorney general will be more "positively inclined" to work with the secretary of state regarding election security issues.

Risner and the Pima County Democratic Party said the results confirm the need for the parties to scrutinize election results, which is why the party has filed lawsuits for election records and data.

The Regional Transportation Authority was relieved by the news, although the authority was not under investigation because the county conducted the election.

"We're certainly relieved that there are no significant findings that anyone is at fault," said Gary Hayes, the RTA's executive director.